Can a dinner party turn into a political execution ground for the sake of morality?

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In the 1995 dark comedy The Last Supper, five liberal graduate students decide to rid the world of extremists by inviting them to dinner and murdering them. What begins as a desperate act of self-defense quickly spirals into a systematic, cold-blooded ritual that challenges the group's own moral foundations.

Directed by Stacy Title and shot in just 18 days, the film follows five students—Jude, Pete, Paulie, Marc, and Luke—living in Iowa. After a violent confrontation with a racist, Holocaust-denying veteran named Zack, the group kills him and decides to continue the practice. They establish a formal procedure: guests are given the chance to recant their extreme views before dessert, at which point those who refuse are served poisoned wine from a blue decanter and buried in the garden.

The victims represent a spectrum of ideological extremes, including homophobes, anti-abortion activists, and Neo-Nazis. However, the group’s self-righteous mission begins to fracture after ten murders. Internal guilt and indecision mount, leading them to spare a teenage opponent of sex education. The arrival of a famous conservative pundit, Norman Arbuthnot—a character loosely based on Rush Limbaugh—serves as the ultimate test. Unlike their previous guests, Arbuthnot is moderate, persuasive, and impossible to debunk, leaving the students paralyzed by their own inability to justify their violence against a man who refuses to play the villain.

Critical reception was polarized. Roger Ebert praised the film as a brave, Swiftian effort that highlights how freedom depends on the rights of one's enemies. Conversely, reviewers like Janet Maslin and Rita Kempley criticized the plot as repetitive, schematic, and lacking in genuine provocation. Despite a modest domestic box office gross of $459,749, the film has found a lasting niche among Generation-X audiences for its capture of the early 1990s zeitgeist. The story concludes with a chilling ambiguity, suggesting that the students' radicalism may have ultimately paved the way for the very figures they sought to eliminate.

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